I’m trying to find my pulse now. I keep pressing two fingers against the opposite wrist, trying to locate proof of life, trying to get a sense of my natural rhythm. I’ve started and stopped a handful of projects in the studio. The inspiration only lasts for a couple of days or hours before it fizzles out and I toss the project aside — out of sight, out of mind, into the scrap heap. I’ve never needed to cleanse my palate so repeatedly. So redundantly. So obsessively. I’m like a person who needs to wash their hands every five minutes.
My soul wants to gargle salt water, spit and repeat.
I need something deeper burning. I need something longer lasting. I need a fine fire instead of bursts of untamable sparks.
I talked to a creative friend about idea making, about dreaming up ideas, choosing from those ideas and how to actually go about following through and making good the commitment to a project — for me, seeing an idea through to the end, to completion, is one of the greatest and most terrible aspects of creative work. I want to commit myself and my hands to the ideas that sink the deepest and plague me the most, the ideas that keep me awake at night, torn between the indolence of sleep and the loud, blank pages of my sketchbook where it sits on the travel table in the front of the Airstream. Those are the ideas that need to be exorcized, exercised, pulled out like thin threads from the silk of my mind and released into thin air.
Ideas need freedom.
In this in-between time when my own pulse seems lost to me (or rather, misplaced), it’s a time for dreaming and taking stock and building thoughtful momentum. I grow impatient with that kind of work, I want to see the tangible fruit of my labor and I want to see it now. I act spoilt. I rebel against the notion that there are creative chores that hold hands with the beauty and bounty and productivity of creative work. I cannot have one without the other.
It takes work and concentration to rise up into a space of clarity.
This week, I find myself wondering if my ideas come out of me as victims of over-gestation due to the long breaks from the studio I have been forced to take over the past couple of years. I have a sense of being ridden under tight rein, constrained by a tight cinch. I’m desperate to take the bit in my teeth.
Can an idea be over-mature, past a point where I can intuitively muddle my way through it, step by step, rabbit trail by rabbit trail? Do ideas have expiration dates? I sometimes imagine that by the time I make it into the studio my ideas are falling from me like over-ripe, wasp-bitten pears from lofty tree branches…like babies born with size fourteen feet and wisdom teeth. The bright birth of idea and concept can seem, at times, delayed, wizened, too-grown-up.
When I tinker, play, grow and create, I want to toy with seeds that are thirsty for sunlight and rain, tiny things that hold promises of aliveness, fullness and the story of growth, development and evolution.
Perhaps the thing to do here is to step out in faith, over and over again, fight my way to the new surface of things, kick and pull past the old rot and up into the lively place of thrumming and gusting possibility.
exactly.
i am in the midst of letter writing and wrote almost that exact same thing to you….trying to find my pulse, my rhythm, my flame.
i have this internal gnawing, and it will probably find its way quite soon. i hope, anyway. my soul needs to KNOW.
good to drop in and see how you are faring, dear friend.
xx
Planting seeds. Each little bit that is part way developed piles up with every other little bit and I’m betting they will eventually all come together in a way you are not expecting.
Besides, adventurous and exciting and scary and joyful as your recent big move has been – it DOES take that slow ebb of tide to settle in to your new life. Shaking silt always clouds the vision for a while. I have a mantra that I will share with you: “Patience and peace with the process.”
By the way – what did you do with your fabulous antique clerks desk?
Blessings on you deary. I’m sure your pulse is strong.
I believe sometimes ideas can become overripe….if only because we have somehow changed or grown or shifted from the time in which we jotted them down…then , there are some ideas that even though they were recorded a long ways off, still hold intrigue….the drag of being an artist sometimes , is that we have to wade our way through both types to really see which ones still deserve the light of day, so to speak….!….much love to you, Plumey Babe!:)
I was the same whilst I was studying for my degree.
Ideas would come, and I wouldn’t always get time to work on them straight away, and then they would fizzle away as new ideas forced their way in. Maybe you’re right, maybe ideas do have an expiration date. An idea has to sit right with me, weigh me down and keep me awake at night, that’s how i separate the fleeting wisps of images on the periphery, and the solid ideas at the forefront of my mind
So intriguing how themes roll through ones life. I wrote an article on this topic last week, the next day Rivka Malka posted an excerpt from the book she is writing along the same lines, and now your post. Must be a message I need to hear and contemplate deeper.
In Rivka’s post she talks about real time and not real time… times of action and times of waiting…. all of which are just journey’s… some long and some short – it’s what we do during them, and our attitudes, that matter.
Omg! An Empire Strikes Back tee! Terrific!
Your discussion of creative ebbs,flows and inspiration ring so true. I know you will delve deep into the well once more.
This resonated so much for me: “I need something deeper burning. I need something longer lasting. I need a fine fire instead of bursts of untamable sparks.”
I so hear this. My drawings each take a very long time to complete, most especially when I think of their beginnings as when they first started rolling around in my head, and endings as my signature on the paper. They go through so many stages, some of which are ugly and tedious, and, often, I have pictured or imagined them so obsessively in my head, that I almost feel done with them before their true end…my mind already falling more in love with the next vision! At the end of the process I am always happy I stuck it out, pleased with the end result, but getting there isn’t always easy.
Also, that Airstream! Wowza!
You have put down perfectly what has been rolling around in my mind for a while. Sometimes I actually feel cursed by my creativity, rather than blessed. I will come up with a hundred awesome designs but not have the desire or energy to actually begin to make even one. Rarely does energy and inspiration strike at the same time. It’s frustrating. Most likely it is just the season I am in – filled with motherhood, wifehood, homeschooling, etc… Though my brain continues to kick out ideas, by hands mostly lay idle when I finally have a moment free to create. I’m trying to force my way through it, not just because I feel better when I have seen a vision through to completion, but also for the cold hard reality of needed extra income.
Oh Jillian, this is a crispy kind of crunchy ripeness!
Often times my creative spirit can have such a restless heart, with my eyes focused on the end result, my hands clasping the makings of my newborn dreams, while my artistic soul catnaps…
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up, my spirit cries, you need to complete all these projects that you have begun. And my soul gently sleeps.
Momentum, aaah.
I discovered, not too long ago, a need for my creative spirit to respect the actions of my artistic soul. That the catnap (as I call it) is indeed an action and not an element of inertia. It, too, is part of the process. That space of clarity can rest deep within my soul.
My ideas are always ripe to the taking however my artist’s creative attention to my ideas is often immature & unripe or over-mature & bruising. Ideas, as with dreams, never acquiesce. Lack of attention, can mean simply not being in tune, on time or mindful of the creative process. When I’m mentally or physically restless and pour energy that into a creative endeavor most often it results in a lack of concentration; and I skip the heartbeat of my idea and miss its magic…as I now roll my eyes at all of my back-burner projects!
I try so hard to remind myself of the need to balance my creative heartbeat with the pulse of my ideas because my ideas are a force all their own! Add to all that the self-inflicted stress to create. To lose momentum on any given project/idea/dream can also generate speed, or better yet, shift into synchronicity. Once I am in synch, the magic happens! And it always finishes course!
And as I glance over at my unfinished projects, I pause to gleam over them. In time, I whisper, in their own sweet time.
Bless the ability to ideate, and to put those creative sparks into tinkering, playing, growing and even discarded motion. Bless the passion to create magic. Bless the desire to shed light, rain & life to the seeds of creativity! Bless the beginnings & the pauses.
Ideas without a voice or an action are merely our own best kept secrets…and secrets, quite frankly, are void of all magic. “Ideas need freedom.”
XOX